La Grande by Juan José Saer

Gutiérrez waits. Nula is unaware that recognition, approval, confidence, and mutual history have just been exchanged, tacitly, by the utterance of their names. Gutiérrez hasn’t said a thing to anyone else, but the others, who’ve now understood that they’re not being asked for, don’t seem at all interested in their sudden appearance. Only the barman stands alert, paused in the middle of drying the glass, but when Nula, to indulge him—because Gutiérrez hasn’t looked at him once—makes a friendly gesture with his head, the man, as though the nod triggered a remote control, looks down and keeps drying. Escalante picks up the third card, studies it, places it over the others, and deposits all three, so perfectly aligned that they seem like a single card, face down on the table. He looks up at Gutiérrez. Then he stands up slowly, inspects the three men following the game, chooses the one that seems most qualified, and gestures for him to take his place. He walks around the table, and when he reaches Gutiérrez he doesn’t hug him or shake his hand, only looks him in the eyes and gives him a soft nudge on the chest with the back of his hand. Gutiérrez smiles, but with a look of protest.
    â€”I live practically around the corner, and it took me a year to find you, he says.
    â€”I saw you once, in a car, but before I could put two and two together, you were gone, Escalante says. And another time you walked down my street, but you were with someone. How’d you know I was at the club?
    â€”Your daughter told us, Gutiérrez says.
    â€”My daughter? Escalante says. I don’t have children. That was my wife.
    Opening his eyes wide and biting his upper lip and shaking his head hard, Gutiérrez’s face takes on an exaggerated look of admiration.
    â€”It was no great feat getting such a young wife, Escalante says. For her, it was between poverty and me, and she lost: she got me.
    It’s difficult for Nula to sense the irony in Escalante’s words; his tone is so neutral and flat that it seems deliberate. It’s like he’s talking to himself, Nula thinks, speaking to something inside. And he realizes that he’s been thinking about how Escalante’s wife laughed when, referring to Gutiérrez, she said, I know who you are . That cheerful sentence implied that she and her husband had already talked about him, and that there might be a sense of irony between them when it came to the subject of Gutiérrez. Meanwhile, when Nula sees them face-to-face, it seems impossible—unless they’d been avoiding it on purpose—that they never once met in the past year. Who knows what reason they might have had to delay the meeting, since they must have known that it would happen sooner or later. When they exchanged their names across the table of truco players without looking at each other, Nula realized, without understanding exactly what it meant, that despite their efforts at pretending otherwise, both men had been aware of even the most intimate details regarding the other for all of the past year. And then he thinks that it’s not impossible that when he saw Gutiérrez closing the door to his house he wasn’t actually planning to come to Rincón, and that only at that moment did he decide to go, because without him, Nula, he wouldn’t have dared come looking for Escalante at home. And Nula is so absorbed in these thoughts that Gutiérrez has to say his name twice in order to introduce him.
    â€”Mr. Anoch, he says, wine merchant. Doctor Sergio Escalante, attorney.
    The overly formal manner of the introduction, in particular the use of their surnames and professions, underscored by his sober tone, suggests to the two men that Gutiérrez’s regard for theirpersons goes well beyond these superficial details—antithetically, in fact, to these social characteristics—in the quarter of authenticity and courage, of